“Supply shortages will persist until 2030.” The memory crisis could last until 2030, warns SK Hynix, and predicts that after that robots will come to eat your RAM
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- SK Hynix just released its third quarter 2026 financial results
- These came with a prediction that the RAM crisis will last until 2030.
- After that, further memory loss is expected due to “physical AI such as autonomous driving and robotics.”
Apologies for bringing you more negative news about the RAM crisis, but we’ve heard another prediction that supply problems will last for the rest of this decade.
This time stepping in (again) is SK Hynix, a memory chip maker that just released its latest earnings report, as Wccftech noted. Profits are booming, as expected, but SK Hynix also shared its latest thoughts on the RAM crisis and the likelihood of it being a protracted affair.
In its Q3 2026 results press release, SK Hynix succinctly announced: “Memory supply shortages will persist through 2030.”
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That was the title of a section informing us about the memory shortage, where SK Hynix further observed: “The company assessed that supply… is not keeping pace with market growth. Given the technical difficulty of cutting-edge processes and the long time required to build new production facilities, it expects the structure in which demand exceeds supply to persist until 2030.”
The company also predicted that it will maintain its growth and revenue, which surpassed 100 trillion won in the third quarter (incidentally, the first time this has happened in a quarter) thanks to enterprise and AI demand in the near term, and “in the medium and long term, demand for physical AI such as autonomous driving and robotics.”
Analysis: a ‘virtuous circle’ for shareholders, a nightmare for consumers
It is interesting to note that SK Hynix predicts that long-term memory demand will be driven by robots or ‘physical AI’ even if software AI (agents) declines somewhat as the decade draws to a close. Micron predicts exactly the same thing and recently went into even finer detail by estimating that “humanoid robots” could need 200GB (or more) of RAM and several terabytes of storage in each drive.
So there’s similar thinking here from the big memory module manufacturers, but that shouldn’t surprise us. After all, they need to talk about their future profits and assure the markets that we are not in a bubble, so it is natural that they want to make predictions about the main future income streams that will be tapped.
Still, there’s clearly some substance to these predictions, and it’s worrying for consumers that a growing number of analysts and big tech industry players are talking about the RAM crisis lasting until 2030, and that robots are apparently set to take over from AI data centers and drive demand for more memory as we head into the next decade.
We can only hope that Micron and SK Hynix are exceeding their expectations that hungry robots will eat all our RAM within a few years, although how that ground lies will depend on how widely the robots are adopted, as well as how much memory they will need.
Meanwhile, SK Hynix claims that the “virtuous circle” that has resulted from AI-driven productivity gains driving greater infrastructure (data center) investment will continue and will furthermore “expand to include general enterprise and country-level initiatives,” with the result that the “global AI data center infrastructure market will continue to grow steadily.”
I don’t think many PC owners or gamers will feel that the way things have been going with memory lately is all that “virtuous”, but shareholders of SK Hynix and other big chipmakers certainly won’t complain. After all, they can probably afford a very good PC even in today’s climate of super-bloated components.
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